Time and again when presented with a certain piece of evidence Creationists seem to reply with the same unsatisfying retort.
There is a particular line of reasoning I want to discuss here. In various threads recently we've seen it. Let me show you an example:
If a diety created life, how would you expect it to look. The fact that your interpretation of the design of things leads you to believe that evolution is fact has no bearing on what God's design would look like. I would, for instance, expect homology within many organisms if they all had a common creator.
The most compelling (to me) piece of evidence for common descent (macroevolution) is found in DNA sequence comparisons. It is possible to compare the DNA sequences of organisms. The basic idea being that if common descent is true, we should find that these comparisons produce a nested hierarchy similar to the ones produced by cladistics.
Until I learned of this line of evidence, I could understand in some way the creationist position, but having learned of it - I couldn't understand how anyone could say 'There is no evidence for macroevolution'. There is a wonderful debate out there that sums all this up.
The first part can be found
here
Evolution demands similarities in the genes and proteins of species thought to have recently evolved from a common ancestor. Since biologists think that humans and chimps both descended from an ancestor who lived just five to eight million years ago, the molecules of inheritance (DNA) and the DNA's expressed proteins should be quite similar between these two species. Conversely, one would expect many more differences between creatures related more distantly, such as humans and turtles.
In fact, there is no difference between the cytochrome c's of human and chimp. Human cytochrome c differs from a rhesus monkey's by just one amino acid, and from an erythrocebus patas monkey's by a different one (Dayhoff 1979). But, humans differ from whales at ten different cytochrome c sites, at 15 for turtles, and so on (Figure 1). There is a "Message" in these proteins: species thought to be closely related turn out to have proteins that are also closely related. If human cytochrome sequences were completely different from those of the apes, or even all other creatures, evolution would have collapsed overnight. Instead, the molecules were in perfect accord with evolutionary expectations - independent and compelling confirmation
The response from creationists? Generally it is 'similar designer', but that doesn't explain why Chimpanzees DNA is more similar to humans than Turtle DNA is. In the interests of fairness you can read ReMine's response
here. The whole debate can be viewed
here. If someone can make heads or tails out of ReMine's response and its relevance, that would great.
Do any of our creationists/IDers have any response to this nested hierarchy from DNA sequence comparison?
Do they have any response as to why this common designer decided to put this hierarchy in line with cladistics?
Bio evo seems the best place don't you think?
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